Dutch Voters Kick Racist Geert Wilders Right In The Netherlands

Everybody does that occasionally. Maybe not in the Dutch Parliament, though.

Dutch voters decided they'd rather not have their perfectly nice country lumped in with the USA and Britain as one of those places where xenophobic "populist" race-baiting resulted in a surprising election result, so instead they rejected the bid of Geert Wilders to become prime minister of the Netherlands. Current Prime Minister Mark Rutte claimed victory Wednesday night, and will now work on building a coalition government.

Wilders only received about 13 percent of the vote, but increased his anti-immigrant party's numbers in the parliament all the same. He promised that in the next election, he and his crowd of racist knobs will surely get the chance to close mosques and ban the Koran, for freedom:

“We’ll have to wait for the next time to make this happen,” Wilders told reporters early Thursday. “I guarantee you, this patriotic spring will start. It has already started.”

Or maybe after Donald Trump continues as the world's best argument for nativist populism, Wilders will have even less of a chance. Hard to say!

Wilders fanboy Steve King, the Iowa Republican congresscritter who recently went Full Fascist in his praise for Wilders's brand of anti-Muslim bigotry, was surprisingly quiet on Twitter today; we'll assume he's still sobbing into his Confederate flag. While King hasn't yet tweeted that Wilders's loss marks the beginning of the end of western civilization, he is at least raising funds off the uproar created by his warning that "We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies," so it appears there's still a market for politicians who openly mirror the sentiment of the White Power slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

Meanwhile, in Europe, leaders in France and Germany are treating Wilders's loss as a sign that the whole world might not be going crazy in the wake of Brexit and the election of the orange hairbag as president of the United States. Maybe it's just English-speakers who have lost their minds. Several called Rutte to congratulate him on winning, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said, “I look forward to continued good cooperation as friends, neighbors, Europeans.” French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Twitter, "Congratulations to the Dutch for stopping the rise of the extreme right. Willingness to work for a stronger Europe." Both France and Germany face upcoming elections in which neo-fascist parties have polled well, but then, Wilders had strong polls in the Netherlands until just a few weeks before the election.

American fans of Wilders are disappointed, but share his certainty that it's only a matter of time until Tomorrow Belongs To Them; this was the butthurt banner at Breitbart.com this morning:  

So sure, Wilders lost, but really, he won because it was close, and now the Powers That Be better start joining the anti-immigrant movement or they'll definitely lose next time.

We can at least be certain of one thing: Win or lose, the racist right is definitely a minority almost everywhere (let us never forget Trump didn't get a majority of votes), but they're just noisy enough to convince themselves everyone must surely agree with them. And they'll remain insufferable no matter what.

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[ WaPo / Dead Breitbart / Politico ]